Hi all,
About fonts, the Oracle JRE used to include the Bigelow and Holmes Lucida font. It was mapped to the Dialog font and even hard coded as a fallback font if the specified font name could not be found on the system (for example, you select Comic Sans but it isn’t installed on the system) or if the Character cannot be represented in the selected font. This is because the Lucida Sans font had pretty good glyph matches for a lot of languages. Unfortunately, the Lucida Sans font is not included in the Open JDK, and not even the standard Oracle JDK due to licensing. This would have broken almost all projects that use any internationalization and the fonts that would appear on buttons might vary from computer to computer so we needed a fix. We settled on Googles Noto Sans. It has high coverage of most languages and can be redistributed and bundled with our bundled JVM. The Dialog font is now mapped to this font meaning that in most scenarios your projects would work seamlessly without modification, even after considering internationalization. There are really only two downfalls here:
- CJK Fonts could not be supported. The Font files are just too large to be distributed with the bundled JDK. There are plans to make it easier to add these yourself, but for now you will likely need to install them. The can be found HERE
- If you use the default Dialog logical font some of the attributes of glyphs might differ slightly from Lucida’s resulting in some cut off of otherwise tightly packed components whose bounds were set based on the character width. This requires that the component be resized to match the Dialog font or a specific Physical font be chosen for those components (It should be noted that you must ensure that the selected font is installed on all machines that will launch a Designer or Vision Client using this font)
More information about Physical and Logical fonts can be found HERE and information about the removal of the Lucida Font can be found HERE
I hope that provides some clarity about the font changes made in Ignition 8.0!
Thanks,
Jonathan C